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Part 1: The Emperor
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Passion, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion
Storytelling
Gambling
War
Hero-Worship and Religion
Summary
Analysis
A different narrator (later revealed to be Villanelle) explains that her city (Venice, Italy) is full of waterways and mazes that require faith to navigate. According to rumor, the city’s boatmen have webbed feet. If a boatman’s wife becomes pregnant, she boats to a graveyard island on the night of a full moon, leaves rosemary in the boat for protection, and brings offerings to the grave of her most recently deceased family member. She prays for the child to have “boatman’s feet” if a boy or “a clean heart” if a girl.
Readers may not trust Villanelle’s fantastic claims about Venice—that its waterways require faith to navigate, that its boatmen have webbed feet, and that boatmen’s wives perform strange rituals under the full moon. Yet whether or not readers trust such myths, they create—at least in the world of the novel—a meaningful shared culture for the people of Venice and its boatmen in particular, thus revealing the power of stories.
Themes
The boatmen never take off their boots. Yet once, a tourist bribed a poor boatman to take off one boot. The next day, the tourist was found speaking nonsense and yanking on his toes, and the boatman was gone. The tourist ended up in the asylum San Servelo, while the boatman—Villanelle’s father—disappeared. Villanelle’s mother discovered she was pregnant after the disappearance. She performed the ritual at the graveyard island, though she dropped her rosemary by accident rather than leaving it in her boat. Shortly thereafter, she remarried a rich baker.
Villanelle’s account of her personal history has a fairytale quality: her biological father disappeared after breaking a mysterious cultural prohibition, her pregnant mother erred during another important cultural ritual, and she gained a stepparent before she was born. This fairytale quality reminds readers that all individual histories—the sense people make of their lives—are essentially constructed narratives like fairytales even when the events they relate are factually true.
Themes
Villanelle is born during a solar eclipse. She has red hair, bright eyes, and webbed feet. Villanelle’s mother is deeply grieved, blaming herself for dropping the rosemary and remarrying fast. But when her new husband returns home, he points out that no one needs to know as long as Villanelle wears shoes. Soothed, Villanelle’s mother lives with her daughter and husband “in an ordinary way” for the next 18 years.
According to Villanelle’s story, she is the only girl child to inherit Venetian boatmen’s webbed feet—a detail that foreshadows her future androgyny. Amusingly, Villanelle passes over 18 years of her life by saying they occurred “in an ordinary way”—a jump that points to the subjectivity and partiality of storytelling (who is to decide whether Villanelle’s childhood was “ordinary”)?
Themes
Napoleon takes Villanelle’s city in 1797. Subjugated, its citizens turn to “pleasure” and “excess” as consolation for their lost freedom. Villanelle dislikes what Napoleon does to the city: stealing its gems and art, leveling some of its churches, and so on. Yet she doesn’t dislike the French, and her stepfather the baker actively likes their business, going so far as to give his stepdaughter the French name “Villanelle.”
While serving as a general of the French Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte conquered and looted Venice in 1797 while marching on Hapsburg Austria as part of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802). A “villanelle” is a fixed verse form with repeating end rhymes pioneered by French poet Jean Passerat (1534–1602). Due to the villanelle’s “obsessive” repetition of line endings, it is often associated with themes of passionate obsession. As such, Villanelle’s name foreshadows the relevance of passion and obsession to her life.
Themes
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At 18, Villanelle begins working for the Casino because, as a girl, she was not allowed to become a boatman. Having trailed the boatmen much of her life, though, she knows the city’s secret waterways. This is where she sees various exiles, Jewish communities, and packs of violent orphans. One exiled woman with slimed-green hair, toothless and dressed in old curtains, asks Villanelle’s name. When Villanelle shares it, the woman tells her the name is a “disguise” for a Venetian and warns her to be wary of gambling.
Villanelle’s adventures in Venice’s interior characterize her as unconventional, adventurous, and curious. The woman with slimed-green hair says Villanelle’s name is a “disguise,” implying that her stepfather renamed her—she may have an original, Italian birth name that readers never learn, emphasizing the incompleteness of the life story Villanelle chooses to share. Meanwhile, the woman’s warning that Villanelle beware of gambling may foreshadow that Villanelle’s Casino job will be dangerous or that she will make an unwise bet.
Themes
Villanelle works at the Casino dressed as a boy, but the customers like to examine her and guess her actual biological sex. One August, the city holds a ball in a piazza to celebrate Napoleon’s birthday, for which the Casino provides “booths of chance.” Villanelle puts on makeup, men’s clothes, and a moustache to man a card-playing booth. She likes the smell coming off the gamblers: “somewhere between fear and sex. Passion, I suppose.”
Napoleon was born August 15, 1769, so this scene takes place on our around August 15. Villanelle defines the smell of the gamblers’ “passion” as “between fear and sex,” suggesting that there is a fundamentally erotic and obsessive charge to gambling, uncertainty, and risk.
Themes
A large man, one of Villanelle’s regulars at the casino who seems interested in finding out what’s beneath her male costume, comes to her booth to play. He chooses first too low a card to win and then too high a card, losing. Afterward, he comments that she’s grown a moustache in two days, steals the Jack of Hearts from her pack for luck, and leaves.
The large man’s interest in Villanelle while not knowing her biological sex hints at his bisexuality. The union of casino-work, flirtation, and gambling in this scene emphasizes the connection between risk and eroticism that the novel has already established.
Themes
According to Villanelle, Venetians used to live their lives at night. They build so many bridges not simply to span water but to represent meetings, neutrality, and possibility. Now that soldiers have swarmed Venice, the night is full of torches, not as dark as it used to be—but some Venetians still have slit eyes like cats from living so long in the dark. And Venetians still hold their funerals at night, on boats.
Villanelle is telling a cultural story according to which French occupation has fundamentally changed what it is like to be Venetian: the French have lightened the Venetian night and rendered the Venetians’ slit eyes vestigial. Though readers may doubt the factual truth of Villanelle’s story, the story truthfully communicates her sense that the war and the French occupation have negatively impacted Venice as a society.
Themes
Yet at present, the Venetian night exists for pleasure-seekers. A woman with gray-green eyes wearing a mask approaches Villanelle’s booth and wins at cards after drawing the Queen of Spades. Villanelle tells her that the Queen of Spades is lucky, the “symbol of Venice,” and asks whether she wants to play again. Instead the woman orders a bottle of Madame Clicquot champagne from a passing waiter, drinks a single glass, and touches Villanelle’s face. Then the woman vanishes, leaving Villanelle a mostly full bottle of expensive champagne. Villanelle reflects that while she has had sex with both men and women in the past, she has not needed to protect her heart, which is “reliable.”
“Madame Clicquot” is a reference to Barbe-Nicole Clicquot (née Ponsardin), who took over her husband’s champagne business after his death in 1805, renamed the business “Veuve Clicquot” (which means “the Widow Clicquot” in English), and pioneered many of the champagne production techniques still in use today. As the novel will later reveal that this scene takes place in August 1804—before Clicquot’s husband died and left her the champagne business—this cultural allusion may be an intentional anachronism meant to draw attention to Villanelle’s unreliability as a narrator. When Villanelle refers to her heart as “reliable,” on the other hand, she indicates that she has been self-possessed in past romantic affairs, not falling passionately in love.
Themes
At midnight, there are fireworks. Villanelle pays a friend to take over her booth and goes looking for the woman with gray-green eyes. Though she searches all around, she cannot find the woman. When she returns to her booth, her friend tells her that a woman came by looking for her and left her a golden earring as a token. Villanelle puts the earring in her own ear and removes the Queen of Spades from the deck, thinking that she only wants the woman to win tonight and that she is safeguarding the card for her.
Contrary to Villanelle’s previous claim that her heart is “reliable” and self-possessed, her dogged searching for the woman with gray-green eyes implies that Villanelle has become immediately and passionately infatuated.
Themes
Shortly before dawn, the ball is breaking up. Villanelle, feeling strangely energized, decides to unwind by boating. She sails past the casino and various other buildings into the lagoon. As she rows, she feels that she can sense her ancestors and muses that the past causes the future and without past or future, “the present is partial.” Thus, people should both remember and dream. Looking into the lagoon, Villanelle sees her own distorted reflection and wonders who she will be. She thinks: “Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny.”
Earlier in the novel, Domino told Henri that only the present was real, not the past or the future. By contrast, Villanelle here claims that “the present is partial” without the past or future because what happened in the past determines the present and future. Villanelle’s uncertainty about what will happen in the future when she sees her reflection implies that risk and ignorance about the future are fundamental parts of the human experience, yet her claim that passion is “destiny” suggests that a person’s passions determine what will happen to them, whether they know it or not.
Themes
Villanelle spends the next few weeks in a stupor, barely sleeping, wandering Venice, working at the Casino, and periodically entering Venetian churches. She doesn’t feel “tempted” by the idea of God, yet she likes the beauty of religious architecture, and she thinks that if she were able to transmute her passion into something “holy,” she wouldn’t be suffering from insomnia.
Villanelle’s weeks-long disorientation after meeting the woman with gray-green eyes further emphasizes that Villanelle has become infatuated with this mysterious figure. Her wish to transmute her passion in a “holy” direction, meanwhile, suggests that in Villanelle’s view, religion is social form that people use to sublimate and control their more basic, unruly, individual passions.
Themes
At one point, the large man proposes marriage to Villanelle, on the assumption that she is, in fact, a woman. He offers to keep her in luxury in exchange for her continuing to dress as a young man at home. Villanelle almost wants to knife him, but—simply to distract herself from the distress of not finding the woman with gray-green eyes—asks him how he gets his money. He explains that he supplies Napoleon’s army with large amounts of poor-quality meat. Villanelle allows him to buy her champagne. When she tastes the Clicquot, she thinks of the woman touching her face and wonders how “anything so passive could be so pervasive.” Then she recalls how Christ simply said, “follow me,” and it happened.
When Villanelle wonders how “anything so passive could be so pervasive,” she is asking herself how a “passive” moment in her own life—she simply held still and allowed the woman with gray-green eyes to touch her face—could have filled her whole mind. Villanelle’s confusion suggests that passion isn’t something people actively seek out but something that seizes them unawares. Her comparison of her passion seizing her to Jesus Christ ordering his disciplines to follow him further emphasizes that (in Villanelle’s view) religion is a cultural invention for sublimating people’s unruly personal passions.
Themes
When the large man begins groping Villanelle, she throws him off and says she won’t marry him. He threatens her job, but she retorts that she’ll keep it—she’s good at it, and she has a number of clients like him. He hits her. Astonished, she hits him back. He pins her to the wall and sexually assaults her, staining her shirt, and she doesn’t struggle because of how much he outweighs her. Afterward he drops a coin and leaves. Villanelle returns to work.
The large man’s abrupt and shocking sexual assault on Villanelle—and his giving her a coin afterward—reminds readers of French soldiers’ brutal treatment of sex workers. This scene may be implying that due to the French occupation of Venice, the French army’s brutal treatment of sex workers has begun to influence relations between civilian men and women—an implication heightened because the large man has told Villanelle that he works in requisitions for the French army.
Themes
In November, catarrh spreads through Venice. Everything turns gray and foggy. One day, Villanelle is drinking at Florian’s when the waiter brings her an earring—which makes a pair with the one Villanelle already has. Suddenly, the woman with gray-green eyes appears. Villanelle realizes that she’s dressed as a man because she’s about to go to work but lacks the moustache she’d put on when she first met the woman. The woman says, “You shaved it off,” and invites Villanelle to dinner. Later, while working, Villanelle worries that the woman thinks Villanelle is a young man. She wonders whether she should explain. Then she thinks to herself: “You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play.”
“Catarrh” is an inflammation of the nose and throat; the word was often used prior to the advent of modern medicine to refer to colds, sore throats, fevers, and ither maladies. When the woman with gray-green eyes says, “You shaved it off,” it implies that she believes that Villanelle is actually a young man and that the moustache she was wearing at Napoleon’s birthday ball was real. Villanelle rationalizes her decision to pursue the woman anyway with the phrase: “You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play.” This phrase suggests that people are condemned to “play”—to take action without knowing whether they’ll “win” or “lose”—no matter what, so they may as well gamble wholeheartedly to try to obtain the objects of their passion.
Themes
Villanelle visits the well-to-do, quiet house of the woman with gray-green eyes. They eat dinner and talk intimately. When Villanelle mentions that her father was a boatman, the woman asks whether she has webbed feet, and Villanelle says she does. The woman laughs. Then the woman explains that she is married to an Eastern antiques trader, whom she likes and who is away from home. When at last Villanelle stands to leave, she and the woman become entangled, and she kisses the woman’s neck. The woman announces that they cannot have sex—but they can kiss. After they kiss for a long time, Villanelle leaves, wondering what the woman thinks and feels.
The woman with gray-green eyes seems to think that Villanelle is joking when she claims to have webbed feet. This misunderstanding suggests that stories can be deceptive in multiple ways: narrators can be unreliable, yes, but audiences can also misunderstand whether narrators are joking or serious. Meanwhile, Villanelle’s willingness to get involved with a sexually unavailable married woman suggests the depths of her infatuation.
Themes
Villanelle, feeling disoriented by her new passion, resolves to protect her freedom and spits into the canal, symbolically spitting on passion. Yet then the moon splits the clouds, and Villanelle recalls how her mother boated “in faith to the terrible island.” She removes her shoes, examines her webbed feet, and tries to walk on water. At first, her feet sink beneath the surface. Then she asks herself whether one woman could have a sustained passion for another and “step[s] out.” The next morning, a beggar claims he saw a young man walking on the canal. Villanelle concludes: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
Villanelle worries that her passion threatens her freedom, which suggests that the involuntary nature of passion makes it a danger to people’s self-control. Yet Villanelle implies that after asking herself whether two women can have a committed romantic relationship, she “step[s] out” onto the canal—and walks on water. As walking on water is one of Jesus Christ’s most famous miracles in the Gospels, this scene yet again suggests that religion is just a sublimation of individual erotic passion. Meanwhile, Villanelle’s repetition of the novel’s refrain, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me,” suggests that walking on water and committed lesbian relationships may both seem unbelievable to Villanelle’s imagined audience—but the audience should try to believe in them anyway.
Themes
At the Casino, a soldier challenges Villanelle to a game of billiards. If she wins she gets his money, and if he wins she has sex with him. He wins. After the soldier falls asleep, Villanelle steals his uniform. Sometime later, she puts it on and goes to see the woman with gray-green eyes. After they have dined together and played dice, the woman asks to stroke Villanelle’s feet. Villanelle, panicked, says she never takes her boots off outside her house. The woman asks Villanelle to take off her shirt, and Villanelle—wanting to hide her breasts—uses the bad weather as an excuse not to do that either. She begins kissing the woman’s neck instead.
The casual wagering of sex and money in Villanelle’s encounter with the soldier strengthens the links the novel has already formed between economics, eroticism, and risk. Meanwhile, Villanelle continues to hide her biological sex from the woman with gray-green eyes—which suggests that despite Villanelle’s apparent success at walking on water, she still has difficulty believing in the “miracle” of the woman returning her lesbian passion.
Themes
When Villanelle leaves, the woman with gray-green eyes says that her husband is coming back soon and she doesn’t know when she can see Villanelle again. Villanelle, walking away, wonders whether the woman does this dance with someone every time her husband leaves. She wonders whether the woman’s passion is “passion out of passion’s obstacles.” Then she returns to the woman’s house, knocks, announces that she’s female, and lifts her shirt. The woman, smiling, says she knew. Villanelle stays the night.
When Villanelle wonders whether the woman with gray-green eyes makes “passion out of passion’s obstacles,” she is essentially wondering whether the woman has a passion for adultery merely because adultery is logistically difficult—whether it is the difficulty itself that the woman finds erotically charged. This question of Villanelle’s emphasizes that people can have passions for all sorts of strange things, not merely straightforward romantic passions. After Villanelle comes clean with the woman about her biological sex, the woman admits she knew, and the two women consummate their relationship—which implies that the woman with gray-green eyes was waiting for Villanelle to tell her the truth before having sex with her.
Themes
Christmas approaches, and Venice lavishly decorates its churches. The woman with gray-green eyes is traveling for Christmas with her husband, as they habitually do. Villanelle feels relieved to be temporarily free of her love affair, which has involved many secret rendezvous. Now her schedule is free and she can focus on herself—though she acknowledges she’d be terribly unhappy if her love were gone permanently. She thinks that the lover “plays roulette with anything precious” despite longing for it constantly. But she feels that this is an expression of “humanness,” not a sin. Moreover, she believes that while human religion is a form of passion, God is obsessed with humanity without being passionate. Sometimes human beings manage to reach a heavenly state like God’s, but “then human voices wake us and we drown.”
Villanelle’s relief at pausing her affair with the woman with gray-green eyes emphasizes that Villanelle experiences passion as a loss of self-control and thus of individual freedom, even as she remains passionately infatuated with the woman. When she muses that a lover “plays roulette with anything precious” and that this indicates “humanness,” she is expressing that it is human nature to risk the things that one loves and values most. In this passage, Villanelle also makes explicit that she thinks religion is a species of passion—but that God isn’t passionate. The phrase “human voices wake us and we drown” is a quotation from the last line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem by T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). This highly anachronistic allusion draws attention to the fictionality, artifice, and unreliability of the novel’s narration.
Themes
Venice celebrates New Year’s Eve with a boat procession down the Grand Canal. Villanelle boats around the secret waterways of the inner city. She passes the woman with slimed-green hair, wearing a crown made of dead rats, and makes her way to the house of the woman with gray-green eyes. Peering in the windows, Villanelle sees the woman staring at her own hands. Then the woman’s husband walks in and kisses her. Villanelle realizes that although the married couple is not passionate, they have “a calm” together that frightens her. Villanelle boats away, wondering what future she and the woman have together. Soon, the great clock strikes January 1, 1805.
The “calm” between the woman with gray-green eyes and her husband implies that love and passion are not the same thing: the married couple can truly love each other in a peaceful fashion without having the passionate relationship that Villanelle and the woman share. Villanelle’s fear at seeing the married couple together may foreshadow that she loses whatever gamble she has made in pursuing an affair with the woman.
Themes
